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India's Kumbh Mela, a religious festival occurring once every 12 years at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, attracts over 80 million pilgrims to a temporary "pop-up megacity" over the course of two months. A team of faculty and students from five Harvard schools attended the Kumbh Mela to learn from the phenomenon. The festival was a planning, organizational, financial, and spiritual success—in stark contrast to the understood concept of India as unable to accomplish projects at large scale. The authors propose that the concept of government as a minimalist platform—focusing on a handful of tasks and doing them well—was the key to success. The administration focused on land allocation, roads (mostly for walking), public safety, electricity, and water. Non-government actors provided almost all other products and services. This was a match of ambition with capability that can be replicated in other fast growing, semi-informal cities in the developing world.

The business case for acting sustainably is becoming increasingly compelling—reducing our global footprint to sustainable levels is the defining issue of our times, and it is one that can only be addressed with the active participation of the private sector. However, persuading well-established organizations to act in new ways is never easy. This book is designed to support business leaders and organizational scholars who are grappling with this challenge by pulling together leading-edge insights from some of the world's best researchers as to how organizational change in general—and sustainable change in particular—can be most effectively managed. The book begins by laying out the economic case for change, while subsequent chapters describe how leaders at firms such as Du Pont, IBM, and Cemex have transformed their organizations, exploring issues such as the role of the senior team and the ways in which firms shift their identities, build innovative cultures and processes, and begin to change the world around them. Business leaders will find the book a source of both powerful examples and immediately actionable ideas, while scholars will be deeply intrigued by the insights that emerge from the cross cutting exploration of one of the toughest challenges our society has ever faced.